Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Does Atheist Discrimination exist to the same degree as that experienced by ethnic minorities in the US? One the one hand we can make these observations: Atheists are not denied equal access to housing for lacking belief in god They are not kept from seeing their partners during life-threatening scenarios in hospitals Atheists don’t earn … Read more
Now here is a small piece of encouraging news from Today’s Guardian … Unicorn’s are no longer extinct. Basically … the last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972, thus making it more or less extinct. However, a successful captive breeding programme and reintroduction efforts mean its population now stands at 1,000. You can read … Read more
In Professor Richard Wiseman’s latest book, Paranormality, he suggests that it is very easy for so-called psychics to give highly accurate readings. Later, in the back of the same book, he gives an example that can be utilized to convince complete strangers that you can read their aura (or some other similar medium babble) and demonstrate that your apparent psychic powers are real, because you know all about them.
OK then, lets put that to the test here and now.
There is a great article in today’s UK Telegraph by Hugh Pennington , the emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen. It has been written in response to the news that Bill Gates and also the UK government have comitted huge sums to money, when yesterday they pledged £814 million on top of the UK’s existing commitment to GAVI (the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisation) of £680 million between 2011 and 2015.
Here are a couple of choice quotes that I’ve plucked out because I really like them …
Not too long ago I blogged about a crazy Egyptian Islamic Cleric, Shaykh Abi-Ishaq al-Huwayni, who suggested that Muslims who were short of cash should go on a raid and sell any prisoners taken in the market.
As you might imagine, it caused a bit of a stir (his comments made it into the Egyptian press), so he was interviewed over the phone by a TV station and asked to explain himself. At first he appeared to back off a bit and suggested that his words had been taken out of context, but then he proceeds to put it into a 7th Century setting. What is astonishing is that his explanation is even more outrageous and utterly offensive to any normal sane human.
Here we do indeed have an individual, who is not just out of time from another century, but has had his sense of morality so utterly fucked up by religion, that he appears to be from another millennium.
I recently came across an article about “Cliff Richard“. Looking at what had been written, I was rather surprised to find that the author wrote about how Cliff met a Catholic Priest and that they now lived together and were really good close friends. I thought to myself, “no, that simply can’t be right, I … Read more